How do you validate that each voter is real? What if the fraud moves to the voter registration?
Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions.…
Some context: Switzerland has votes on issues about four times a year, and they managed to do this with paper, mostly via mail (if someone local knows otherwise, please correct me). Recently they tried out e-voting, with what I consider predictable results: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/voting-with-a-click_hacking-fear... Also, I agree with ianstormtaylor in that I don't think that what you're proposing would necessari…
> If the same security demands were required when postal voting was introduced in 1990, it would never have been allowed
He has a point there. Transportation, heavy machinery, power grids, cruical infrastructure, healthcare, economy and so on all increasingly run computer systems with questionable security. Lives and world order depend on them. Are we really going to draw the line at voting? (edit: expanded on this point a bit)
Trust on the scale of several years is a difficult thing. People go from lovers to archenemies in that time. But yes, some long term projects do need stability and long term support to become fruitful. You could introduce constraints to support this, or trust the voters to take it into account.
But even more important than time is the granularity of trust. Just as in everyday life I trust different people to different degrees in different domains, I would love to have a voting system that reflects this with regards to political representatives or activists.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#23I'm not sure about this specific approach. As other comments note, this is somewhat complex. That said there may be a few gem ideas. - Did my vote get counted? (can you prove it) - Did it get counted correctly? (can you prove it) - Can a vote be both traceable to the voter and anonymous publicly? The parallel to blockchain is simple. I get a "vote coin" that I can spend at the election. You can then see who has the m…
the biggest problem isn't buying and selling votes, its distribution of the votecoin. if you can get votea into the hands of legitimate voters, the rest falls into place.
That aspect wouldn't have to change from how it's done today. Go to your polling location and show/prove residency for registration purposes.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#24Not sure what this solves. I'm a huge proponent of Bitcoin/Blockchain, but how is this a better solution than say, one centralized national database? Blockchains are useful in situations where centralized trust can't be established or would be less valuable. If you can't trust the government that's running the election process, how would a blockchain solve that? Too many blockchain proposals just boil down to buildin…
Trust in the government is not a given. They must earn trust through public support, which is why propaganda and PR are such power government tools used to change what the public supports. With a blockchain, you don't have to trust the government at all, since it is public and very difficult to tamper with. If they do not comply with the outcome in the blockchain, the public outcry will cause severe upheaval. To not…
You can fix that in other ways. Governments are inherently centralized. If you are voting, well that vote is meaningless without a government to enforce the results.
There are cheaper ways to get transparency than a blockchain I think.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#25Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up…
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions.…
It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned.
In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled to become qualified, to deal with a lot of the questions that come up. I'm pretty happy to instead vote for a person (or even just a party) to represent me in most cases. I don't want to propose policies.
Lots of people in my town are retired and/or seem to have endless time and energy to devote to meddling in town business. It would be exhausting if I had to keep constant vigilance every few weeks or months to make sure these people can't enact policies, rather than just voting every few years to make sure they don't get into office.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#26Looking at the "Voting Machine Security Specifications", it's a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day. This means that you have to trust the: * VPN * OS * Network stack * Display and input drivers (HW and SW) * SSD controller * CPU * CPU's "Management Engine" or equivalent * Mainboard chipset To all be free of exploits and backdoors. You're trusting many, many thousands of people, fr…
You don't have to trust them that much, though. These are all COTS components used in every other computerized system everywhere, so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention.
That's pretty hard. How, for example, are you going to get a CPU bug to do this for you?
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's sort of like saying that we're fools for using gas-powered engines for the military. Thousands of people design them, so how do we know the designs haven't been sabotaged? You might be right, but you're probably wrong.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper voting doesn't allow for much more citizen involvement than most "democratic" countries have today. You can hold elections every few years, maybe a referendum once or twice a year at most, but any more than that and it becomes inconvenient, inefficient and not so cheap. As a citizen, I want to be more involved. Even in a representative democracy, I want to hold my representatives responsible for their actions.…
It sounds to me like you would like to be a representative on your local city council, or a town board. Why not run for election? Then you can do everything you mentioned. In principle, frequent voting might sound nice. But I don't know if it really would be in practice. (I'm not arguing a position here, just thinking out loud.) I'm not really interested in most politics, I don't really feel qualified, or compelled t…
See, that's just it. There's a spectrum of involvement. I may not want to run a campaign, go door to door to collect signatures or spend days in council meetings.
At the same time, I do want to vote directly on issues I have a strong opinion about, I'm willing to put in the effort to find different people to delegate my votes to in domains I'm not competent in. Occasionally I may have an idea I would like people to discuss and vote on. If people like the idea, they may even delegate their votes in that specific domain to me and I would be further motivated and empowered to come up with and champion similar ideas.
I think technology would allow everyone to find their sweet spot of involvement in this spectrum.
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#28My blockchain-based voting proposal:
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#29Cannot prevent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud when voters succumb to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Re: Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]
#30Looking at the "Voting Machine Security Specifications", it's a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day. This means that you have to trust the: * VPN * OS * Network stack * Display and input drivers (HW and SW) * SSD controller * CPU * CPU's "Management Engine" or equivalent * Mainboard chipset To all be free of exploits and backdoors. You're trusting many, many thousands of people, fr…
You don't have to trust them that much, though. These are all COTS components used in every other computerized system everywhere, so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention. That's pretty hard. How, for example, are you going to get a CPU bug to do this for you? I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's sort of like saying that we're…
> so any backdoors the authors want to slip in would have to impact only the voting system, and not raise anyone else's attention.
Except that many of the backdoors are universal backdoors, meaning that they can be remotely updated with new instructions.